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public health
Sinners: Real Monsters of Greed and Racism Still Stalk the Gulf South
The Riverplex Megapark planned for Louisiana's Ascension Parish threatens both the history and future of the community with the destruction of former slave cabins and the construction of a polluting ammonia plant.
Apr 12, 2026
I was pleased to see Sinners have a good night at the Oscars, picking up four trophies. It didn’t win Best Picture, but to my mind, it is the movie of the year. Sinners had far and away the greatest cultural impact, especially among Black people.
Sinners is the rare blockbuster film that explores Black history from the perspective of Black people, but I believe the reason the film has touched such a nerve is that it’s much more than a period piece. When I watched Sinners, I didn’t just see a movie about the past. I saw a mirror. The horror in the film isn’t history; the blood-sucking vampires of racism, white supremacy, and cultural erasure still haunt us today.
For me, Sinners hit literally close to home. Although it is set in Mississippi, it was filmed entirely in southeastern Louisiana, where my roots trace back to a small community called Donaldsonville. The film reminded me of my childhood when grandpa and I walked the avenue to shop. We’d walk from Smoke Bend, up the avenue, to a warehouse on the edge of town to get syrup in a yellow can—perfect for eating with fry bread. What’s funny about the movie is that Michael B. Jordan’s characters’ names were Smoke and Stack. And my grandpa told me that Smoke Bend got its name from the Indian campfires travelers saw when they came around the river bend. The scenes where Smoke and Stack go to Clarksdale to buy supplies were shot on Railroad Avenue in Donaldsonville, where I live and work. Folks from around here remember hearing the alarm and radio announcements from Ascension Parish Barn on Church street as they shopped along the Avenue.
The Jim Crow era depicted in Sinners has ended, but here in Ascension Parish, we are in a struggle to protect Black lives and preserve Black heritage. In the name of economic growth, the Parish government is planning to create a massive, 17,000-acre industrial complex—the so-called Riverplex Megapark—featuring a Hyundai plant and other pollution-producing factories. The complex will decimate the historic predominantly Black community of Modeste and part of Donaldsonville, displacing as many as 800 people.
We will not be able to protect our communities unless more should-be allies come to recognize that environmental justice is a major civil rights issue of our time.
In October, Modeste residents reported that heavy machinery had demolished some of the slave cabins on the site of the former Germania and Mulberry Plantations. The purpose of the destruction was to make way for the Hyundai facility, which could destroy both plantations as well as the neighboring Zeringue Plantation.
Those cabins hold the stories of their enslaved ancestors, the people whose labor built this land and whose spirit still breathes through it. Among the destroyed cabins was one of deep significance to me: My uncle, Cloveste, was born in one of them. Like the juke joint in Sinners, those cabins are a sacred space; they are bloodline, legacy, and love—and they were bulldozed to make room for corporate profit.
While erasing our past, this industrial complex also threatens our future. Located in the heart of “Cancer Alley,” Ascension Parish is one of the most polluted counties in the United States. Less than 3 miles from my house is the world’s largest ammonia plant, the single worst polluting factory in the country. I am a breast cancer survivor. All three of my children were born prematurely, and one of them has had respiratory problems his whole life. These kinds of sicknesses are commonplace around here. Yet plans for the complex include another ammonia plant that will spew out thousands of tons of pollution.
Down here, corporate executives don’t wear hoods or burn crosses, but their greed can kill us just the same.
We are all for development, but we want economic growth that strengthens our communities, not that erases and endangers them while creating generational wealth for others. Rural Roots Louisiana, the organization I founded, is leading an effort to block the “megapark,” and a judge recently ruled in our favor, ordering the front group behind the project to turn over relevant public records.
But we are up against forces with bottomless resources, which they are using to try to buy out and pay off people in the community. This presents people with hard choices, but as we see in Sinners, there is a cost to accommodating your oppressor. As Director Ryan Coogler said, his film explores “the deals people in oppressive situations must rationalize.”
In this struggle, as in all my work, I take heart in the example of our ancestors, who persevered in the face of even steeper odds. Their efforts and sacrifices ended American apartheid, and it is important to remember how far the country has come. Sinners itself, the fact that it got made, is a form of progress. It serves as a rebuke to those trying to erase Black history.
I also draw inspiration from activists and organizers throughout southeast Louisiana. A few years ago, in Plaquemines Parish—where most of Sinners was shot—community members blocked an oil terminal that would have destroyed a cemetery where their enslaved ancestors were buried. In St. James Parish, community groups have made headway in their lawsuit seeking a landmark moratorium on petrochemical facilities, while in St. John Parish, a historic Black community waged a heroic battle against a proposed grain elevator.
Still, we will not be able to protect our communities unless more should-be allies come to recognize that environmental justice is a major civil rights issue of our time. Put another way, environmental racism might not seem like the scariest vampire—it dresses in suits and wears nice shoes—but none have more blood on their teeth.
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‘Disgusting’: Trump’s Top Economic Adviser Brags About Killing 300,000 ‘High-Paying’ American Jobs
"Everybody is hurt by what he's celebrating," one public employee union official told Common Dreams. "I guess it's just par for the course from this administration, but it's still a disgusting thing to hear."
Apr 10, 2026
President Donald Trump's top economic adviser boasted on Fox Business Thursday that the government had slashed more than 300,000 "high-paying" jobs from the federal payroll during the president's first year back in office.
Asked by anchor Maria Bartiromo about the administration's efforts to cut government spending, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said it had made "a huge amount of progress."
"I think the biggest thing that we can point to is that we've cut government employment by 300,000 workers," he said. "Those are jobs that are very high-paying that are gone forever."
He claimed the cuts reduced government spending by "an unthinkable amount of money," perhaps $1 trillion over the next ten years.
He also said that the administration "reduced the deficit last year by $600 billion" through a combination of higher-than-expected economic growth, tariff revenues, and "supply side effects" of Trump's massive tax cut, which mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans while gutting the social safety net.
Dean Baker, a longtime collaborator of Hassett’s despite their opposing political beliefs, wrote on social media that Trump’s economic adviser was dramatically exaggerating the deficit reduction that occurred during the administration's first year.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the deficit was about $1.8 trillion for fiscal year 2025, just $41 billion less than the previous year and $56 billion lower than the $1.9 trillion deficit CBO projected in its most recent baseline.
"In the real world, the deficit fell... less than one-tenth of what Kevin claims," Baker said.
Trump has touted the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of government employees from their "boring federal jobs" as one of his crowning achievements.
Among the agencies hit by mass layoffs were the Department of Veterans Affairs, where more than 12,700 employees got the axe; the Department of Health and Human Services, which lost more than 14,400 workers; the Social Security Administration, whose staff shrank by more than 6,600; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which lost more than 4,000 employees.
Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest labor union representing federal workers, told Common Dreams that even if slashing jobs did reduce the deficit as Hassett claimed, the harm far outweighs any such benefit—not only for the fired employees, but for the millions of Americans who depend on services they provide.
"When you say 300,000 jobs, it is a nice round number, and you link it to deficit reduction, which he was lying about," Simon said. "The fact of the matter is, the disappearance of those 300,000 jobs means degraded healthcare for our veterans; slower or nonexistent service at the Social Security Administration for the elderly and disabled who rely on Social Security for their income; and the elimination of huge swaths of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that help ensure we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink."
"You have federal prisons absolutely overwhelmed by too many inmates and too few corrections officers, endangering public safety," she continued. "Consumer product safety has been eviscerated. There are also serious public health concerns involving substance abuse, childhood nutrition, and vaccinations."
She decried Hassett's comments as "ignorant" in light of his false claims about deficit reduction, but also "just demonstrably pretty cruel and disdainful" given the impact these job losses have on individuals, families, communities, and society as a whole.
"It's cruel," Simon said, "not only on the people who held those jobs—about a 100,000 of whom are military veterans—but the impact of the disappearance of those jobs also falls on children, the elderly, anybody who consumes agricultural products, breathes air, or relies on clean water."
"Everybody is hurt by what he's celebrating," she added. "I guess it's just par for the course from this administration, but it's still a disgusting thing to hear."
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A Public Health Emergency: How Abortion Bans Are Fueling Maternal Deaths in America
People living in states that have banned abortion are nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after compared with those in states where abortion remains legal and accessible.
Apr 10, 2026
The maternal mortality crisis in the United States is a national embarrassment, and it’s unfolding in real time. The US continues to have one of the highest maternal death rates among high-income countries, and the situation is getting worse, not better. Behind this trend is a growing body of research showing that state abortion bans directly contribute to increased maternal mortality, especially in communities already burdened by systemic inequities.
Maternal mortality has traditionally reflected deep structural problems in a healthcare system that fails to serve all people equally. In 2024, the US maternal mortality rate ticked upward again, reversing a brief decline and demonstrating that the crisis is far from over. Experts point to a range of causes, including reduced access to prenatal care, maternity care deserts, and strained hospital systems, all problems intensified in states with abortion restrictions and in states with increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
A comprehensive analysis from the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mortality figures shows that people living in states that have banned abortion are nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after compared with those in states where abortion remains legal and accessible. What’s more, in supportive states where abortion has remained legal, maternal mortality has declined by about 21% since 2022, suggesting that access to comprehensive reproductive care saves lives.
Restricting abortion does more than eliminate a medical procedure; it forces people to carry pregnancies that pose very real health risks. Childbirth has inherent dangers from hemorrhage and infection to hypertensive disorders and cardiac events, and the risk of death from pregnancy is at least 44 times higher than from abortion. When abortion is inaccessible, people are compelled to continue unwanted or medically unsafe pregnancies. That dynamic alone drives increased deaths that could otherwise have been prevented.
Bans do not reduce the prevalence of abortion; they reduce its safety, push people into riskier medical scenarios, and leave pregnant people with fewer options even when their health is at stake.
Racial and socioeconomic disparities in maternal mortality did not begin with the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Black birthing people in the US have long faced significantly higher death rates than white birthing people, a symptom of deep structural racism in healthcare, poverty, and chronic stress. But abortion bans have exacerbated these inequities.
In states with abortion bans, Black birthing people are more than three times as likely as white birthing people in those same states to die from pregnancy-related causes. Those figures make crystal clear that when we talk about maternal mortality, we are talking about a crisis of racial inequity, class inequity, and political neglect. States with the worst maternal health outcomes, including Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, are predominantly in the South and have enacted some of the most restrictive reproductive laws.
These disparities compound with other conditions such as limited access to early prenatal care—which the CDC reports has declined across the country, with the steepest drops among Black mothers. Delays in early care are associated with worse outcomes for both mother and baby and are worsened by the closure of maternity care facilities in rural and under-resourced areas.
For undocumented and immigrant communities, the maternal mortality crisis is layered with additional barriers. Fear of immigration enforcement, including ICE, deters people from seeking care, even in emergencies. Clinics in border states with large immigrant populations were already medically underserved before Dobbs, and abortion bans have deepened that inaccessibility. Many undocumented people lack insurance, fear reporting, or face economic barriers that make traveling for care impossible. These structural obstacles do not just delay care, they can literally cost lives.
Immigrant and mixed-status families are disproportionately concentrated in states with abortion bans, like Texas, Arizona, and Florida, meaning that people who already face the greatest systemic barriers to healthcare are also the most likely to lack access to safe abortion or comprehensive maternal services. This intersection of racist policy, reproductive restriction, and anti-immigrant enforcement creates a perfect storm that pushes already vulnerable people further to the margins and deeper toward harm.
Critics of abortion argue from moral or ideological positions, but the evidence shows that access to abortion care is fundamentally a matter of public health. Bans do not reduce the prevalence of abortion; they reduce its safety, push people into riskier medical scenarios, and leave pregnant people with fewer options even when their health is at stake.
We are now witnessing a preventable loss of life, and the window to act is closing.
We know how to prevent many maternal deaths: Expand access to comprehensive reproductive care (including abortion), strengthen prenatal and postpartum support, increase Medicaid coverage, invest in maternity care infrastructure, and dismantle the historic and systemic inequities that predict who lives and who dies. We know these interventions work because states that have protected reproductive rights are already seeing declines in maternal mortality.
To ignore this crisis is to ignore evidence, dignity, and the lives of pregnant people, especially those in Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and economically disadvantaged communities.
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